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The Wedding Dress Maker


Helene Wiggin - 2000
    This is not the first time her stepmother has taken what is rightfully hers. First it was her dead mother's rainbow necklace - Netta's only legacy - now her son... Netta is unable to protest such treatment, for it is 1945 and, in the eyes of her God-fearing community, she is doubly cursed: an unmarried mother who struggled with mental health problems after giving birth to her son. After being banished from her beloved Galloway, to a Yorkshire mill-town, Netta is determined to show she is capable of building a life for herself, so she can return to Galloway and claim back her child... PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS: The Stone Rainbow

Dr Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World


Mudrooroo - 1983
    Since it had come from the sea, it was an evil omen.Soon after, many people died mysteriously, others disappeared without a trace, and once-friendly families became bitter enemies. The islanders muttered, 'It's the times', but Wooreddy alone knew more: the world was coming to an end.In Mudrooroo's unforgettable novel, considered by many to be his masterpiece, the author evokes with fullest irony the bewilderment and frailty of the last native Tasmanians, as they come face to face with the clumsy but inexorable power of their white destroyers.

Gabriella's Book of Fire: A Novel


Venero Armanno - 1999
    The object of his desire is Gabriella, the Italian-Irish girl next door. Then one day Gabriella disappearsabandoning Sam. Bitter and resentful, Sam moves on with his life: into the shady side of Brisbane. Over the next two decades, Sam and Gabriella will find their lives inextricably, painfully, and passionately linked.

Untorn Tickets


Paul Burke - 2002
    Dave Kelly and Andy Zymanczyk are classmates at a strict Catholic school. Both, desperate to escape their stifling backgrounds, get part-time work in the local cinema. Here they form a binding friendship and, with the help of one charismatic cinema manager, embark on a voyage of discovery. Dave falls in love with Rachel, a Jewish girl who also wants to escape from her strict religious background, while Andy falls for a girl he knows he can never have. When the cinema is threatened with closure, the boys realise that more than their new-found freedom is at risk...

Adam's Empire


Evan Green - 1986
    Orphaned at age nine, at home under the stars, completely unschooled, Adam uses his fists and his wits to rise from poverty to prosperity. He befriends an aborigine, performs dangerous work in the opal mines, falls in love with a sensual half-caste, has a run-in with a murderous policeman, marries a cold and manipulative beauty and finally treks west to carve himself an empire. This striking first novel tells a colorful and entertaining story, vividly evoking a vigorous, multiethnic society and a beautiful, diverse, often dangerous land. Green is a journalist and the author of Alice to Nowhere. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library JournalNine-year old Adam is orphaned when his father is buried during an Australian desert sandstorm. A childhood of roaming the outback with his father's drilling partner instills in him a fierce determination to have a place of his own. In this fast-paced, gripping saga, the reader follows the hard-working Adam and his mates, Jimmy, the practical aboriginal, and Josef, the impetuous young German immigrant, from the opal mines to the desert. They feint with death in mine disasters, at the hands of Mailey, the revenge-seeking law officer, and in the ravages of flash floods. A more deadly threat for Adam is his beautiful, calculating, near-mad wife, but a seductive half-caste woman lends her own type of danger to all of the men. Essential for most fiction collections. Joan Hinkemeyer, Englewood P.L., Col.

The Christmas Journey


Emma Ashwood - 2020
    With her eighteenth birthday looming it was only a matter of time before she was turned out to find her own way. Violet wasn’t afraid of starting a life on her own, but she was afraid of leaving Anne behind, the seven-year-old girl who had become like a sister to her.Mark Hearn wants a wife. He is looking for someone with whom to share his life, someone with whom he can find true love. He didn’t imagine that the Matrimonial Times held the answer, but he soon realizes that Violet is the woman of his dreams. When she arrives in Snow Falls with two children, Mark doubts if he can trust a liar to share his life and his ranch.Violet is grateful that Mark believes her lie that Anne is her sister but knows asking him to take in the foundling discovered during her journey would be asking too much. How can she be happy about finding the man of her dreams when that means sending the baby to an orphanage, to the same life from which she had just helped Anne escape? It seemed that Christmas wouldn't be filled with cheer after all.Will Mark open his heart to more than just Violet? Will Violet find her miracle this Christmas? Find out now in this sweet mail order bride romance. Be swept into an unforgettable journey of unexpected challenges and be thrilled to find out that love can conquer all.

The Beloved


Annah Faulkner - 2012
    Faulkner's novel is enlivened by a strong gift for metaphor and the wisdom to use it sparingly.'When Roberta 'Bertie' Lightfoot is struck down with polio, her world collapses. But Mama doesn't tolerate self-pity, and Bertie is nobody if not her mother's daughter - until she sets her heart on becoming an artist. Through drawing, the gifted and perceptive Bertie gives form and voice to the reality of the people and the world around her. While her father is happy enough to indulge Bertie's driving passion, her mother will not let art get in the way of the future she wishes for her only daughter.In 1955 the family moves to post-colonial Port Moresby, a sometimes violent frontier town, where Bertie, determined to be the master of her own life canvas, rebels against her mother's strict control. In this tropical landscape, Bertie thrives amid the lush pallette of colours and abundance, secretly learning the techniques of drawing and painting under the tutelage of her mother's arch rival.But Roberta is not the only one deceiving her family. As secrets come to light, the domestic varnish starts to crack, and jealousy and passion threaten to forever mar the relationship between mother and daughter.Tender and witty, The Beloved is a moving debut novel which paints a vivid portrait of both the beauty and the burden of unconditional love.WINNER OF THE NITA B KIBBLE LITERARY AWARD 2013SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2013WINNER OF THE QUEENSLAND PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR AN EMERGING QUEENSLAND AUTHOR 2011COMMENDED FOR THE FAW CHRISTINA STEAD AWARD 2012

Finding Home


Roisin McAuley - 2004
    As they stumble across Wooldene House, they meet owners Diana and Henry. Widowed Diana yearns for new romance, while Henry is increasingly drawn to Louise.

From Strength To Strength: An Autobiography


Sara Henderson - 1992
    As tough, spirited, warm and funny as the woman herself, From Strength to Strength is the inspirational story of one woman's extraordinary courage and determination.In 1959 Sara met American war hero and shipping magnate Charles Henderson III, and so began what she calls the world's most demanding, humiliating and challenging obstacle course any human could be expected to endure.Three years after their marriage, Charles presented Sara with her new home - a tin shack in a million acres of red dust. Bullo River. After twenty years of back-breaking work on this remote Northern Australian cattle station, Charlie's death revealed that Sara had not only been left with a floundering property, but also with a heart-breaking mountain of debt.With very little to lose, Sara and her daughters Maree and Danielle, took up the challenge of rebuilding Bullo River... with such tremendous results that in 1991 Sara was named the Bulletin/Qantas Businesswoman of the Year.

Mr Stuart's Track


John Bailey - 2006
    The Australian continent stretched for another 2,000 kilometres to the north and 2,500 to the west and no white man had the slightest idea of what was there. It was to be the first of six expeditions mounted by Stuart, then aged 42, as he sought to uncover the mysteries of the interior and forge a path to the north.Ultimately he was to become part of a race across the continent, his rivals being the Burke and Wills expedition. In the end Stuart was to be the first European to cross Australia from south to north and return again, as the cumbersome expedition of Burke and Wills turned from farce to tragedy. Yet his hero's homecoming was to be shortlived. Mr Stuart's Track is a fascinating study of a loner, an explorer of no fixed abode, who battled alcoholism and ill-health to push himself to the limits of endurance in crossing straight through the red centre to the northern seas.

The Inconvenient Child


Sharyn Killens - 2009
    An unacceptable liaison, a secret birth, a mother's silence, and her black child's journey to discover the truth... It is 1948, Sydney, Australia. Pretty, blonde Grace discovers she is pregnant to a black merchant marine who has sailed back to America. The White Australia Policy is in place and society's judgment matters; so what will Grace do with this baby? This is the true story of the inconvenient child. Rescued from neglectful foster care by an American champion boxer, the baby is taken to live in a party house in Sydney's red light district of Kings Cross. Her absent, elegant mother then abandons Sharyn in a convent-orphanage, at age five. By fifteen, discrimination within her family, resentment and clashes over her father's undisclosed identity see the troubled teenager running away to the streets of Kings Cross where she's arrested and sentenced to notorious juvenile detention centers. Sharyn's solace is her love of music but can she realize her dream to become a singer if, by twenty-four, she is trapped in the Kings Cross lifestyle? Determined to find her father, Sharyn sets out in search of her roots, a quest taking her across the world and eventually to America's Deep South. But will she find the loving family and belonging she has yearned for all her life?

Second Half First


Drusilla Modjeska - 2015
    The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky's Lunch have been waiting for.

The Multiple Effects Of Rainshadow


Thea Astley - 1996
    Is he evil? Or crazy? His violence is in fact a mirror for the brutality of Australian life - and is a dim reflection at that, in a country where atrocities by whites against blacks are so ingrained few question them.The effects of the rampage ripple out from the island to link the fates of those who witnessed it, across the north and down through the decades. It is a time when silence in the face of tyranny is at its loudest. When allegiance to English niceties is confounded by the landscape and by the weather. And change is a slow wind that brings little real difference.

The Man Who Gave Up His Name


Jim Harrison - 1978
    

The United States of Australia: An Aussie Bloke Explains Australia to Americans


Cameron Jamieson - 2014
    Written for Americans, but equally amusing to anyone visiting the shores of the Great Southern Land, this book examines the relationship between Australia and the U.S., including how Australians view their American cousins. The author has plenty of experience of working and dealing with Americans. He is married to an American nurse and has lived his life within the massive cultural influence that America has shared with Australia since the Second World War. The author’s stories are brimming with empathy and jokes for his American audience. The book is written from the opinion of an Aussie Bloke and the easy-to-digest chapters are just long enough to leave the reader smiling and well informed.Topics include Blokes and Sheilas, Bloody Foster’s, Dangerous Creatures, Talking to Dogs, The GAFA, Speaking Strail-yun and Working for the Queen. Confused? You won’t be after reading this book!